


Simple Together

by samalander



Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, Imperfections, POV: Clint Barton, spy love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-15
Updated: 2013-02-19
Packaged: 2017-11-29 08:33:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/684941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samalander/pseuds/samalander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the Prompt: One of the things Clint loves most about Natasha's body is how it isn't perfect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

So many people look at Natasha and only see what she wants them to. They see the quirk of her hip, the swell of her breasts, the bow of her lips, and they assume that she is perfect. They assume that she is the paradigm she presents; they forget that she's actually, under all the fight and deadly grace, a human woman.

Clint doesn't make that mistake.

He knows about her faults; even the ones he hasn't seen firsthand, because she's told him about them in great detail. And Clint loves her for them, he loves the way she keeps score, like she has something to atone for.

(She doesn't, not with him.)

And he loves how real she is, solid and soft under his fingertips in a way that no one else in his life is. Real like a weapon, like his bow, and her knows her cracks and flaws in the same intimate way.

He loves the little things about her – the things no one else gets to see, because no one else gets to know how profoundly human she is. He loves the constellation of freckles on her right leg, just three small ones, like Orion's Belt, on the back of her knee. He likes pressing small kisses along the path they take, and he loves that she lets him worship at the altar of her body. 

He remembers the first time she let him into her bed – not the first time they fucked, because that had been hard and fast against a wall, hardly any time to enjoy it because they were lost in the adrenalin of being _alive_ – and how he had wanted to take a year, a lifetime to explore her body. (He hadn't though, because she urged him on, and so he's spent the last few years cataloguing the ways in which perfection eludes her, keeps a record in his mind of the ways in which she is beautiful.)

Her left nipple never gets quite as hard as her right one, and he loves that, too. It's a challenge, he thinks, something that her body does to test him, and she always arches and gasps when he bites down, trying to excite it. She traces the curve of his spine with her fingernails when he sucks on it, cooing encouragement and filthy lies in his ear.

He loves watching her in the morning, the thousand ways she enhances her face, her body. What mark would know about the spare black hairs on her big toes? How would they know of the soft bags under her eyes, the ones that she dabs away with lotion and makeup, carefully applying it and blending with a tiny paintbrush? These are the things Clint gets to see, the things that are only for him.

The things she keeps secret from everyone else.

He wishes he could tell her, wishes there was a way to explain that the scars on her body were more precious to him than gold, were more beautiful than all the seductive moves she had learned in the Red Room, more sensual even than the way she kills men, the way she can take apart an enemy with just a little flick and a sigh.

He wishes he had those kinds of words, but he doesn't. He doesn't know how to tell her things like that, the things she deserves to know. 

He wonders, sometimes, if she loves his imperfections as much as he loves hers. Does she treasure the fact that, no matter how hard he works out, he'll never get a six pack, or does she wish for a physique more like Steve's or Tony's? How does she feel about the hair on his chest, how will she think of it when it starts to gray, showing how many years he has on her? Does she mind that his hands are rough and calloused, he'll never be able to touch her skin with the same softness she can give him?

He supposes what he really wants to know is if she loves him, if she wants him, if she needs him. But neither of them would ever use those words. Not out loud. People in their line of work didn't need each other. They didn't express desire like the rest of the world, because someone will find a way to use that against them. Because they have to be vigilant, they have to protect each other at all costs.

But he does, even if he never says it. He needs her.

He tries to show her – tries to lay his emotions at her feet, tries to lean on her when he feels weak. He tries to give her the little secret parts of himself, the parts that would make other Agents laugh or recoil. And she accepts them – she props him up, she carries him through, and, once in a blue moon, she even lets him see her waver.

Maybe it's the only way they can love each other. Maybe she's too programmed and he's too scarred to ever be the kind of people that Tony and Pepper are, the kind of people who would willingly expose each other to the world.

But it's good. For him, it's perfect.

Some nights he lies next to her in bed after she falls asleep and he presses a kiss to her forehead, between her eyes – which he knows will wake her up, but he also knows she'll decide it's him and go back to sleep. How bright those eyes are in wakefulness, how dangerous and perceptive. And the right one is a fraction of a centimeter smaller than the left, or more heavily lidded, and he loves that, loves that there are ways that even the Black Widow is imperfect.

He loves her. And that scares the fuck out of him.

And if she loves him, if she cherishes his flaws the way he loves hers, then maybe that's another thing to add to the list. Maybe "scared of loving you" is a totally acceptable flaw, and maybe, just maybe, Natasha thinks it's one of the things that makes him perfect.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The thing that Natasha loves most about Clint is that he is his own.

The first thing Natasha ever noticed about Clint – even before the gleam in his eye or the bow in his hand – was that he made decisions. He looked at her face, which was covered in blood at the time, and she stood as strong and defiant as she could be with a bullet in her shoulder. She watched him change his mind; she knew the exact second that he made his the choice to save her.

This, she decided, was a man who was his own. And Natasha had never been her own, not since she first awoke in the Red Room, not since before she could remember.

And when she got to know him, as she watched him sleep that night, in the SHIELD safehouse he took her to (and he fed her and gave her clothes that weren't sticky with blood and he told her that he wouldn't kill her but she was still ready for him to, she was always ready for someone to kill her) she thought he was more than a man who was his own – he was a man who was in possession of his physical self.

She had lived a life, to that point, that revolved around selling herself. She sold her skills to the highest bidder, for whatever job they could afford. And sometimes that meant killing, and sometimes that meant sex, and sometimes it just meant being at the right place at the right time. But whatever it meant, Natasha sold her body as a weapon. She didn't own it; she had no control over the things she did with it. She was bought, she was ordered, she obeyed.

And Clint – Clint was a killer, like her. He was a spy and a soldier and a sniper, he was dangerous and deadly, but he wasn't anyone's belonging, not the way she was.

And when, years later, she finally shoved him against a wall in another city, another safehouse, another lifetime, she had the feeling of having learned a great lesson – she was her own. No orders had been given, no missives received. She was just Natasha, making a decision about how to use her body. And he was Clint, letting her make that choice. Both of them, accepting the consequences of their actions, and forging ahead.

His body was a marvel; it was a whole world she had never seen from the marks she gave pleasure. He wasn't slow or methodical or gentle with her, because he was still _Clint_ , but he was decisive, he was real, and he was interested.

She loved the little parts of him that were _him_ \- the spot on the back of his head where the hair never grew, where he told her he had hit his head when his dad threw him at a bookcase. The chicken pox scar on his side, and how he laughed when she touched it, claiming he was ticklish there, and only there. She loved his second molar on the top right of his mouth, which had be ground down flat due to some dental trauma or another when he was in foster care, and never capped because, he said, “fuck dentists.”

She loved that his nose was too big for his face, the prominent vein in his arm, and the kinda dopey smile he got when he walked in on her doing something normal, like brushing her teeth, or changing her shirt. Because he seemed to revel in the ways that she was normal, on how she breathed and blinked and swallowed just like a human being would.

She loved him.

She knew that it was strange, and she would deny it to anyone - human, god, other - who asked, but between Natasha and Clint there was an unspoken something, a feeling of completeness that she had never had with another person. 

And it wasn't because he made her complete - it wasn't that Natasha alone was Natasha in pieces. It was because of what he showed her, because he spared her life and he gave her a choice - because someone had looked at her not as a weapon, but as a person. It was in that idea, the idea of personhood, that she had found her whole self.

He called it agency, and she laughed when he did because there was something so intensely funny about an Agent with Agency that she barely knew how to take it. She tried to explain to him once why it was funny, but all she managed was a hopeless, breathless gasp and then she was drinking in his smile - and the way he smiled at her when she laughed, it was almost better than the funny turns of the English language, because his smiles were so genuine, and so unpredictable. She liked it when he smiled, but she loved that he only did it on his own terms.

Their love wasn't clean, it wasn't easy, it wasn't any of the things that the storybooks said it should be, but that was okay, because neither were they. She was no princess and he no knight. There were no magic talismans to collect, no decisive quests to go on to prove fidelity or learn who they were. There was just Clint and Natasha, and all they had were the ways they didn't fit.

He was her friend, that much was for sure, and Natasha didn't have a lot of experience with friends - the girls she was trained with were adversaries and enemies, the men she worked for were fools and corpses, and the only person she knew well enough to call a friend was herself. But she wasn't even sure, before a cocky archer wandered into her life and took her to America, who herself really was.

So she loved him, against her better judgment, and she took every opportunity to show him that. Even if the only way she had was to apprehend him on a walkway and beat him senseless. If the only thing she could do was wait and see if he ever came back to himself, back to her, then she would wait for exactly as long as it took.


End file.
